1 .. SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
2 Copyright(c) 2020 Intel Corporation.
4 Driver for the IntelĀ® Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB)
5 =================================================
7 The DPDK dlb poll mode driver supports the IntelĀ® Dynamic Load Balancer.
12 Follow the DPDK :ref:`Getting Started Guide for Linux <linux_gsg>` to setup
13 the basic DPDK environment.
18 The DLB PF PMD is a user-space PMD that uses VFIO to gain direct
19 device access. To use this operation mode, the PCIe PF device must be bound
20 to a DPDK-compatible VFIO driver, such as vfio-pci.
25 The DLB provides the functions of a DPDK event device; specifically, it
26 supports atomic, ordered, and parallel scheduling events from queues to ports.
27 However, the DLB hardware is not a perfect match to the eventdev API. Some DLB
28 features are abstracted by the PMD (e.g. directed ports), some are only
29 accessible as vdev command-line parameters, and certain eventdev features are
30 not supported (e.g. the event flow ID is not maintained during scheduling).
32 In general the dlb PMD is designed for ease-of-use and does not require a
33 detailed understanding of the hardware, but these details are important when
34 writing high-performance code. This section describes the places where the
35 eventdev API and DLB misalign.